If you are a small business looking to be found on search engines, you can create a checklist to make sure everything is perfect for your next website article. This SEO checklist won’t protect you from crashing and burning, but it’ll help ensure that you have the best chance to rank high in Google.

Here are the top SEO tips for small businesses:

1. Choose a good keyword

Say your business provides drain repair services like Draintony, you’ll want to find out what people are actually searching for. Your first step should be choosing a good keyword you want to show up for.

Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that will help you choose a good keyword by showing an estimate for any search phrase. You might need to set up an AdWords account to gain access to Keyword Planner. For example, when you type in drain repair in Keyword Planner, you’ll notice that “drain repair” receives 210 monthly searches in Toronto.

Click here to read more about the tools Google has available to help your small business.

2. Research your competition

So now that you have a keyword you want to try and rank for, you’ll want to go undercover and research your competition. Start by going on “private browsing” mode on your web browser and head to Google.com. Going on private browsing mode won’t allow Google to use your past search history to influence what you see on the search results page. Ignore any ad results at the top and look at the content on page one of Google. The results on the first page are your competition.

3. Write the best content

You have your keyword, you research your competition, now it’s time to write the best content. Whether you’re creating a web page, blog post, landing page, or an ecommerce store page, it needs to be better than your competition.

What's Your SEO Score?

Enter the URL of any landing page or blog article and see how optimized it is for one keyword or phrase.

4.Put the keyword in your page title

Finished writing the best content possible? You sure it’s going to be better than your competition? Your next step is to put the keyword you’ve chosen on your page title. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the exact phrase, but it can be if you like. You want to make the title interesting enough so people will actually want to click on it. Think of a title that will make people say “Now that is something I would want to read!”

5. Put the keyword in your header

You need to organize your webpage because it’s helpful in showing Google exactly what your blog post is about. Organize your web page by having a large title at the top, followed by several sub-headers through the page. It’s important to use the exact keyword phrase at least once in your sub-headers.

6. Put the keyword in the name and alt-tag of your image

Use images to cement the idea to Google about your post’s topic. There are two ways to do this: the image name and the image alt tag.

Change the name of the image on your computer before uploading. Re-name the file to something like “drain repair 1.jpg” instead of a generic file name like “12345.jpg.” Then, upload it your website.

After you upload the image to your website, change the alt tag to a text that will describe the photo just in case the photo can’t load for some reason on a web browser.

7. Use the keyword in the URL and in the post

Another way to help Google determine what your post is about is the URL. You want Google to choose your website when it’s deciding whether or not to show a certain page. For example, which of the following URLs do you think Google will like better?

8. Insert internal links

You should always internally link other pages on your website, especially the ones with your best SEO content.

9. Get external links

External links are from websites other than your own. Google relies on external links to determine how good a post is. Therefore, you ‘re going to have to do some link building, which means reaching out to other websites other to ask for links.

Hopefully these top SEO tips can help your small business when it comes creating your next website article. If you have any questions, feel free to drop a comment below!

The team at Retailors Group has over 15 years of retail sales and field marketing experience. Retailors Group takes the time to understand your brand and align your core values into a tailor made solution that builds a long lasting relationship with your consumers.